Athens, Still Remains

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a t h e n s , s t i l l r e m a i n s


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Athens, Still Remains The Photographs of Jean-Franois Bonhomme

j a c q u e s d e r r i d a

Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas

F O R D H A M U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S N E W Y O R K 2 0 1 0


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Copyright 2010 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored ina retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic,

mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations inprinted reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Athens, Still Remains was published in French as Demeure, Athnes by ditions Galile, 2009 ditions Galile.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Derrida, Jacques.

[Demeure, Athnes. English]

Athens, still remains : the photographs of Jean-Franois Bonhomme /Jacques Derrida ; translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.isbn 978-0-8232-3205-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

isbn 978-0-8232-3206-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Death. 2. Grief. 3. Sepulchral monumentsGreeceAthensPictorial works. 4. Athens (Greece)AntiquitiesPictorial works. I. Bonhomme,

Jean-Franois, 1943 II. Brault, Pascale-Anne. III. Naas,Michael. IV. Title.

bd 444.d 465313 2010

194dc22

2010020610


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Contents

l i s t o f i l l u s t r a t i o n s vii

t r a n s l a t o r s n o t e ix

* * * * *

a t h e n s , s t i l l r e m a i n s 1

* * *

n o t e s 7 3


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Illustrations

1 Kerameikos Cemetery, Street of Tombs, Sepulcher2 Omonia Squarethe Old Neon Caf3 A Few Moments in the Neon Caf

4 Street Organ5 Athinas Street

6 AthinasMeat Market7 AthinasFruit and Vegetable Market

8 AthinasBaby Chick Vendor9 Photographer on the Acropolis

10 Kerameikos CemeteryFunerary Stele

11 The ParthenonPhotography in Waiting 12 Statue in the Agora

13 AthinasFish Market14 AgoraColumn Fragments

15 Kerameikos CemeteryLekythos16 Antique Dealer in Monastiraki

17 Agora, Inscription18 Kerameikos Cemetery MuseumDetail from a Funerary Stele

19 Monastiraki Market20 Adrianou Street Market

21 Sunday at the Adrianou Street Market22 Athinas MarketTwo Brothers

23 Bouzouki Player24 Persephone Street

25 Near the Tower of the Winds

26 Kerameikos CemeteryStreet of Tombs27 Site of the Tower of the Winds

28 Stoa of Attalos29 AgoraApollo Patroos

30 AcropolisCaryatides Bound31 AgoraSarcophagus

32 Theater of DionysusThrone of the Priest33 Frieze of the Theater of DionysusDionysus, Zeus Seated

34 Frieze of the Theater of Dionysusthe Silenus


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Translators Note

Athens, Still Remains ( Demeure, Athnes) was rst published in 1996 byEditionsolkos (Athens) in a bilingual FrenchModern Greek edition.It appeared there as the preface to a collection of photographs by Jean-Franois Bonhomme published under the title Athensin the Shadow ofthe Acropolis( Athnes lombre de lAcropole). Derridas preface was sub-sequently published alone in French, along with Bonhommes photo-graphs, by ditions Galile in 2009. This English translation is based onthe Galile edition. Derridas original French title, Demeure, Athnes, can be heard in atleast three diV erent ways: as an imperative, Stay, Athens! as a descrip-tion, Athens stays or Athens remains, or as a formulation typicallyfound on oY cial documents to refer to ones place of residence, Res-idence: Athens. The worddemeure can thus be heard either as a noun,meaning house, dwelling, or residence, or as a verb, meaning to remain,stay, or reside. The verbdemeureralso originally meant to defer or todelay. Derrida exploits all of these meanings in this work, along with anumber of related idioms. Because no single English word or even phrasecan cover all the diV erent meanings or valences of the Frenchdemeure,

the title Athens, Still Remains is less a translation than a transposition intoa semantic eld that is akin to the original but overlaps it only partially. Parts of this work were translated by David Wills and published in histranslation of Jacques Derrida and Catherine MalabousCounterpath:Traveling with Jacques Derrida (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004,1038). We are grateful to David Wills for allowing us to adopt so many ofhis felicitous word choices. A graduate seminar in the Philosophy Department at DePaul Univer-

sity in autumn 2009 allowed us to re ne and improve this translation. We would like to express our gratitude to the members of the seminar, as well as to our colleague at DePaul, Elizabeth Rottenberg, for their manyexcellent suggestions. Finally, we would like to thank the Summer Grants Program of theCollege of Liberal Arts and Sciences at DePaul University for its gener-ous support of this project.


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a t h e n s , s t i l l r e m a i n s


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Nous nous devons la mort.

We owe ourselves to death. It was this past July 3, right around noon, close to Athens.It was then that this sentence took me by surprise, in the lightweowe ourselves to deathand the desire immediately overcame me toengrave it in stone, without delay: a snapshot [un instantan ], I said tomyself, without any further delay. As the gure of an example, no doubt, but as if it had prescribed tome these words in advance, what immediately ashed before me was

one of these photographs: Kerameikos Cemetery, Street of Tombs, Sepul-cher (no. 1): on the distended skin of an erection, just below the pre-puce, a sort of phallic column bears an inscription that I had not yet de-ciphered, except for the proper name, Apollodorus. And what if it werethat Apollodorus, the author of a history of the gods? I would have lovedto sign these words; I would have loved to be the author of an epitaphfor the author of a history of the gods.

I had been traveling in Greece with these photographs ever sinceJean-Franois Bonhomme had given them to me. A risk had alreadybeen taken when I promised to write something for the publication ofthese photographs, and I had already begun to approach them with thefamiliarity of a neophyte, where fascination, admiration, and aston-ishment were all bound up together, all sorts of troubling questionsas well, in particular regarding the form my text might take. Without

knowing it, I must have decided on that day, the third of July, having not yet written a word, that the form would be at onceaphoristic and serial.Making use in this way of black and white, shadow and light, I wouldthus disperse my points of view or perspectives, all the while pre-tending to gather them together in the sequence of their very separa-tion, a bit like a narrative always on the verge of being interrupted, but


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also like those funerary stones standing upright in the Street of Tombs (no. 26). Around the one on which the name Apollodorus could beread, I had already noticed the insistence of a serial motif. Back andforth from one to the other, from one column to another and one limitor turning point to the next, this serialityis in mourningor bears mourn-ing [porte le deuil]. It bears mourning through its discrete structure(interruption, separation, repetition, survival); it bears the mourningof itself , all by itself , beyond the things of death that form its theme, if you will, or the content of the images. Its not just in the Kerameikos

Cemetery or among its funerary steles that this can be seen. Whether we are looking at the whole picture or just a detail, never do any of thesephotographs fail to signify death. Each signi es death without saying it.Each one, in any case, recalls a death that has already occurred, or onethat is promised or threatening, a sepulchral monumentality, mem-ory in the gure of ruin. A book of epitaphs, in short, whichbears orwears mourning [porte le deuil] in photographic eY gy. ( Porter le deuil

what a strange idiom: how is one to translate such a bearing or such arange of meaning [ porte]? And how is one to suggest that the dead, farfrom being borne by the survivor, who, as we say, goes into mourningor bears mourning, is actually the one who rst bears it, bears it withinor comprehends it like a specter that is greater than the living heir, who still believes that he contains or comprehends death, interiorizingor saving the departed whose mourning he must bear?) We thus get

the impression that what I have ventured to call, without too much im-pudence, the phallus or the colossus of Apollodorus immediately be-comes the metonymic gure for the entire series of photographs col-lected in this book. But each one of them remains in its turn what itbecomes: a funerary inscription with a proper name. Having to keep what it loses, namely thedeparted, does not every photograph act in ef-fect through the bereaved experience of such a proper name, through


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the irresistible singularity of its referent, its here-now, its date? Andthus through the irresistible singularity of its rapport with or relation to what it shows, its ferance or its bearing, the porte that constitutes itsproper visibility? It thus seems impossible, and thats the whole para-dox, to stop this metonymic substitution. There is nothing but propernames, and yet everything remains metonymic. Thats photography:seriality does not come to aV ect it by accident. What is accidental is, forit, essential and ineluctable. My feeling was to be con rmed as it cameinto sharper focus. Yes, each photograph whispers a proper name, but

it also becomes the appellation of all the others. You can already ver-ify this: without compromising in the least its absolute independence,each of them is what it is, no doubt, all on its own, but each one calls atonce some other one and all the others. I will be able to say this betterlater. Whence the idea of a series of aphorisms analogous to the multi-ple tries or takes of the amateur photographer I am, a stream of snap-shots or stills [clichs] now theres a possible titlesometimes just

negatives waiting to be developed. Here and there a few enlargementsof the thing itself or of a detail. I would thus allow myself a series oftrials and errors: to prolong in one place the time of the pose, to multi-ply in another various zooms or discontinuous close-ups of the sameplace, aV ording myself the liberty to feel my way as I go, to multiplythe stereotypes and the polaroids, to retrace my own steps, to take ashadow by surpriseand always to own up to my inexperience: inept

framing, overexposure, underexposure, shooting into the light, and soon. (Speaking of which, what would Plato or Heidegger have thoughtof this thing called the shutter or, in French, using a name that hasbeen part of the vocabulary of photography since 1868, theobturateur ? Would they have even considered this little mechanism that allows oneto calculate the light passing through, the impression of the sensiblesubjectileand the delaying of the right moment [moment voulu].)


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Still I

We owe ourselves to death. What a sentence. Will it be more or less sententious for being xedor focused on in this way by a lens or objective, as if one were to let itsink back just as soon, without any celebration, into the nocturnal an-onymity of its origin? We owe ourselves to death. Once and for all, onetime for all times. The sentence took me by surprise, as I said, but Iknew right away that it must have been waiting for me for centuries,lurking in the shadows, knowing in advance where to nd me (whereto nd me? What does that mean?). And yetand I would be prepared to

swear to thisit appeared only once. Never does it lend itself to com-mentary, never does it specify its modality: is it an observation or apiece of advice, we owe ourselves to death? Does this sentence ex-press the law of whatis or the law that prescribes whatought to be? Doesit let us hear that, in fact or in truth, we owe ourselves to death? Orelse that we are obliged, that we ought, to owe ourselves to death? Forit came to me, so to speak, only once, this oracular thing, this one and

not another, only one time, the rst and last time at the same time, ona certain day in July, and at a certain moment, and every time I make itcome back, or rather each time I let it reappear, it isonce and for all, onetime for all times, or rather I should say: all the times for a single time.Like death. (One might insert here a short treatise on theidealizationof ideality or on ideal objectivitythrough the iterability of the onetime for all times, and, to stay in Greece, introduce the question of

photography, between Plato and Husserl, in the context of whateidos will have meant.) Tell me, who will ever have photographed a sentence? And its silenceof things sti ed on the surface? Who will ever have photographed any-thing other than this silence? Having surfaced from who knows where, the sentence in question nolonger belonged to me. It had, in fact, never been mine, and I did not


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yet feel responsible for it. Having instantly fallen into the public do-main, it had traversed me. It passed through me, saying from withinme that it was just passing through. Having become its hostage ratherthan its host, I had to oV er it hospitality, indeed, to keep it safe; I was,to be sure, responsible for its safekeeping, for safeguarding each of its words, accountable for the immunity or indemnity of each letter joinedto the next. But the same debt, the same obligation, dictated to me thatI not take this sentence, not take it as a whole, that I not under any cir-cumstances take hold of it like a sentence signed by me. And it did in

fact remain impregnable. This acknowledgement of debt, thisio u , was like a thing, a simplething lost in the world, but a thing already owed, already due, and I hadto keep it without taking it. To hold on to it as if holding it in trust, asif on consignment, consigned to a photoengraved safekeeping. Whatdoes this obligation, this rst indebting, have to do with the verb ofthis declaration that can never be appropriated, weowe [devons] our-

selves to death? What does the obligation have to do with what thedeclaration seemed to mean? Not we owe ourselves to the death, notwe owe ourselves death, but we owe ourselvestodeath. But just who is death? (Where is itor sheto be found? One says,curiously, in French, trouver la mort, to nd death, to meet withdeathand that means to die.)


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Still II

But just who is death? The question can be posed at each and every stepin this photographic journey through Athens, and not only in the cem-eteries, in front of the amassed tombstones, the funeral steles, the col-umns and the crosses, the archaeological sites, the decapitated statues,the temples in ruins, the chapels, the antique dealers in a ea mar-ket, the displays of dead animalsmeat and shon a market street.The person who took his time to take these images of Athens over aperiod of almost fteen years did not just devote himself to a photo-graphic reviewof certain sites that already constituted hypomnesic ru-

ins, so many monumental signs of death (the Acropolis, the Agora, theKerameikos Cemetery, the Tower of the Winds, the Theater of Diony-sus). He also sawdisappear , as time passed, places he photographed, soto speak, living, which are now gone, departed [disparus ], thissort of ea market on Adrianou Street, for example, or the Neon Cafin Omonia Square, most of the street organs, and so on. This world that was the Athens of yesterdayalready a certain modernity of the city

everyday Athens photographed in its everydayness, is the Athens thatis now no longer in Athens. Her soul would risk being even less pres-ent, it might be said, than the archeological vestiges of ancient Ath-ens. Their ruin, the only telling archive for this Market, this Caf, thisStreet Organ, the best memory of this culture, would be photographs. We would thus have to meditate upon this invasion of photographyinto the history of the city. An absolute mutation, though one prepared

from time immemorial ( physis, phos, helios, tekhne, episteme, philoso- phia). This book thus bears the signature of someone keeping vigil andbearing more than one mourning, a witness who is doubly surviving,a lover tenderly taken by a city that has died more than once, in manytimes, a city busy watching over all that is noncontemporaneous withinit, but a living city nonetheless. Tomorrow, living Athens will be seenkeeping and keeping an eye on, guarding and regarding, re ecting andre ecting on its deaths.


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Still III

We owe ourselves to death. I had in any case to pay my debt toward thissentence. No matter the cost. It had taken me, taken me by surprise(as if it had photographed me without my knowledge, unexpectedly,exaiphne s); it had overtaken me, outstripped me, perhaps like death,a death that would have found me where I was still hiding; it had en-trusted me with I dont know what for safekeeping, perhaps myself, andperhaps us; it had especially entrusted itself to me by making advanceson me, by giving me an advance. It had granted me an advance. An advance, thats what it was, whatever else it might have been, wherever it

might have come from and whatever it might have meant. In the eyes ofthis advance, I was not only the debtor but I waslate. Given notice [misen demeure] to pay restitution. I couldnt lose any more time; my rstobligation was to save the sentence as soon as possible, without anyfurther delay. This urgent sentence, moreover, suggested somethingabout urgency. It insinuated at least, on the brink of urgencyleavingme free or pressing me without pressuring mea law of imminence.

Whence the idea, the rst idea, my original impulse, of inscribing itin stone, right here, right away, the idea of xing it or focusing on itprecisely like an idea,eidos or idea , a form, a gure, in this elementof eternity that our imagination naively associates with Greece and itspetroglyphs. I would thus be able to settle up with it and then settle onleaving it, leaving it without losing it. This was precisely my desire, orelse the opposite: to distance myself from it, to set out from it without

ever leaving it.


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Still IV

I was taking a plane a few hours later, and I was having a hard time sep-arating myself from everything, and especially from it, and so I beganto dream of a camera equipped with a delay mechanism: after set-ting up the camera, after adjusting the time of the pose and activatingthe triggering device, I might be able, I said to myself, to run over tothe side of those wordswords loaned, not givenso that the snapshotmight gather us all together once and for all. I would thus let myself betaken by surprise for a time without end, a time in proximity to whichI would feel more nite than ever, myself now entrusted or consigned

in turn to this sentence of stone, consigned for life and up until death[ la vie la mort], linked thus to what would never be mine, but linkedto it demeure, that is, permanently , for the duration.

Still V

demeure, he says. There is nothing here that is not already lodged,

that is, demeure, in the French demeure, from the house to the tem-ple, along with everything that happens to be [ se trouve] photographedhere, right up to la dernire demeure, the nal resting place: everythingcan be found here, from the injunction (demeure! stay!) to themise endemeure. (We aremis en demeure, we are given notice, to pay what weowe within a certain time period, for example, to death, at death, tosettle our accounts, in the end to be released from our obligations, and

to do so without delay!.) Everything having to do with debt and delaycan thus already be found in the worddemeure, as in the sentence weowe ourselves to death, everything, eternally, having to do with ob-ligation and time, everything and the restremains, destiny, defer-ral, delay (demorari: to remain, to stop, to take ones time or to delay which strangely resemblesdemori: to die, to waste away). But the syntaxremains untranslatable, and I was not yet done with everything it keeps


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Still IV

I was taking a plane a few hours later, and I was having a hard time sep-arating myself from everything, and especially from it, and so I beganto dream of a camera equipped with a delay mechanism: after set-ting up the camera, after adjusting the time of the pose and activatingthe triggering device, I might be able, I said to myself, to run over tothe side of those wordswords loaned, not givenso that the snapshotmight gather us all together once and for all. I would thus let myself betaken by surprise for a time without end, a time in proximity to whichI would feel more nite than ever, myself now entrusted or consigned

in turn to this sentence of stone, consigned for life and up until death[ la vie la mort], linked thus to what would never be mine, but linkedto it demeure, that is, permanently , for the duration.

Still V

demeure, he says. There is nothing here that is not already lodged,

that is, demeure, in the French demeure, from the house to the tem-ple, along with everything that happens to be [ se trouve] photographedhere, right up to la dernire demeure, the nal resting place: everythingcan be found here, from the injunction (demeure! stay!) to themise endemeure. (We aremis en demeure, we are given notice, to pay what weowe within a certain time period, for example, to death, at death, tosettle our accounts, in the end to be released from our obligations, and

to do so without delay!.) Everything having to do with debt and delaycan thus already be found in the worddemeure, as in the sentence weowe ourselves to death, everything, eternally, having to do with ob-ligation and time, everything and the restremains, destiny, defer-ral, delay (demorari: to remain, to stop, to take ones time or to delay which strangely resemblesdemori: to die, to waste away). But the syntaxremains untranslatable, and I was not yet done with everything it keeps


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in reserve. I had the impression that, by focusing on these words likea photograph, one couldand the analysis would be endlessdiscover within them so many things that their letters showed by concealingthemselves, remaining [demeurant] immobile, impassive, exposed,too obvious, although suspended in broad daylight in some dark room,some camera obscura, of the French language.

Still VI

For I had already sensed, through these photographs, a patient medi-tation, one that would take its time along the way, giving itself the timefor a slow and leisurely stroll through Athens ( fteen years!), the paceof a meditation on being and time, being-and-time in its Greek tra-dition, to be sure, from the exergue from the Sophist that opens Beingand Time. But being and time in the age of photography. Had not manytrips to Greece over these past few years prepared me for this feeling?

(There was, rst of all, Athens (three times in fact), and Mykonos andRhodes (where I had the impression of swimming for the very rsttime), and then Ephesus and Patmos, with George and Myrto, and thenthe Kaisariani Monastery with Catherine Velissaris and Demonsthenes Agra otis, following the footsteps of Heidegger, who, near the verysame Greek Orthodox temple, did not fail to indict yet again in his Aufenthalte not only Rome, along with its Church, its law, its state, and

its theology, but technology, machines, tourism, tourist attractionsand above all photography, the operating of cameras and video cam-eras, which, in organized tours, replaces the authentic experienceof the stay or the sojourn.) We owe ourselves to death, we owe ourselves to death, we owe our-selves to death, we owe ourselves to death: the sentence kept on re-peating itself in my head, so full of sun, but without reproducing itself.


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in reserve. I had the impression that, by focusing on these words likea photograph, one couldand the analysis would be endlessdiscover within them so many things that their letters showed by concealingthemselves, remaining [demeurant] immobile, impassive, exposed,too obvious, although suspended in broad daylight in some dark room,some camera obscura, of the French language.

Still VI

For I had already sensed, through these photographs, a patient medi-tation, one that would take its time along the way, giving itself the timefor a slow and leisurely stroll through Athens ( fteen years!), the paceof a meditation on being and time, being-and-time in its Greek tra-dition, to be sure, from the exergue from the Sophist that opens Beingand Time. But being and time in the age of photography. Had not manytrips to Greece over these past few years prepared me for this feeling?

(There was, rst of all, Athens (three times in fact), and Mykonos andRhodes (where I had the impression of swimming for the very rsttime), and then Ephesus and Patmos, with George and Myrto, and thenthe Kaisariani Monastery with Catherine Velissaris and Demonsthenes Agra otis, following the footsteps of Heidegger, who, near the verysame Greek Orthodox temple, did not fail to indict yet again in his Aufenthalte not only Rome, along with its Church, its law, its state, and

its theology, but technology, machines, tourism, tourist attractionsand above all photography, the operating of cameras and video cam-eras, which, in organized tours, replaces the authentic experienceof the stay or the sojourn.) We owe ourselves to death, we owe ourselves to death, we owe our-selves to death, we owe ourselves to death: the sentence kept on re-peating itself in my head, so full of sun, but without reproducing itself.


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It produced itself each time for the rst time, the same, to be sure, buteach time anew completely new, like an originalor a negative withoutorigin. Once and for all, the thing itself was lacking in this originalnegative. Its now time; let us begin to look. Look at the Photographer on the Acropolis (no. 9), whom you can see meditating or sleeping, his headresting on his chest, in the middle of the book. I wonder if he hasnt setup in front of him, in front of you, an archaic gure of this delay mech-anism. In order to photograph the photograph and its photographer, in

order to let everything that has to do with photography be seen, in or-der to bookmark everything in this book. What exactly would he havedone, the author-photographer of this book, the author, therefore, ofthis self-portrait? He would have set the animal-machine up on a Del-phic tripod. In following here the echo of my fantasy, everything wouldthus be suspended in the interval of this delay, a sort of diaphanoustime in an air of invisibility. His eyes are closed, but the photographer

protects them further from the light with sunglasses. The author of aphotograph would have also looked for, indeed even sought out, theshade of a parasol, unless it happens to be a re ector.

Still VII

We owe ourselves to death. This sentence was right away, as we have

come to understand, greater than the instant, whence the desire tophotograph it without delay in the noonday sun. Without letting anymore time pass, but for a later time. Why this time delay? An untrans-latable sentence (and I was sure, from the very rst instant, that theeconomy of this sentence belonged to my idiom alone, or rather, tothe domesticity of my old love aV air with this stranger whom I call myFrench language), a sentence that resists translation, as if one could


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It produced itself each time for the rst time, the same, to be sure, buteach time anew completely new, like an originalor a negative withoutorigin. Once and for all, the thing itself was lacking in this originalnegative. Its now time; let us begin to look. Look at the Photographer on the Acropolis (no. 9), whom you can see meditating or sleeping, his headresting on his chest, in the middle of the book. I wonder if he hasnt setup in front of him, in front of you, an archaic gure of this delay mech-anism. In order to photograph the photograph and its photographer, in

order to let everything that has to do with photography be seen, in or-der to bookmark everything in this book. What exactly would he havedone, the author-photographer of this book, the author, therefore, ofthis self-portrait? He would have set the animal-machine up on a Del-phic tripod. In following here the echo of my fantasy, everything wouldthus be suspended in the interval of this delay, a sort of diaphanoustime in an air of invisibility. His eyes are closed, but the photographer

protects them further from the light with sunglasses. The author of aphotograph would have also looked for, indeed even sought out, theshade of a parasol, unless it happens to be a re ector.

Still VII

We owe ourselves to death. This sentence was right away, as we have

come to understand, greater than the instant, whence the desire tophotograph it without delay in the noonday sun. Without letting anymore time pass, but for a later time. Why this time delay? An untrans-latable sentence (and I was sure, from the very rst instant, that theeconomy of this sentence belonged to my idiom alone, or rather, tothe domesticity of my old love aV air with this stranger whom I call myFrench language), a sentence that resists translation, as if one could


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only photograph it, as if one instantaneously had to take its image bysurprise at its birth: immobile, monumental, impassive, singular, ab-stract, in retreat from all treatment, unreachable in the end by any peri-phrasis, by any transfer, by rhetoric itself, by the eloquence of trans-position. Reticent like a word that knows how to keep silent in order tosay so much, a word frozen in its tracks [tombe en arrt], or pretend-ing, rather, to be freeze-framed [arrt sur image] before a video cam-era. An oracle of silence. It gives itself in refusing itself. One time forall times. As soon as ittakes [prend] in language (but who will trans-

late this prendre in the phrase ds quelle prend dans la langue), andonce it is taken by it, it resembles a photograph. The sentence takes inphotography, or takes a photograph of the language that photographs it(like the photographer who photographs himself when he takes a pho-tograph of himself in this book). They are taken, the one and the other,in the unique example of this apparition, this sentence here and notanother, in this irreplaceable language; it is thus, it was thus, it hap-

pened, it took place, this sentence here, one time for all times, as weowe ourselves to death.

Still VIII

Prendre une photographie, to take a photograph, prendre en photographie,to take a photograph but also to take in photography: is this translat-

able? At what moment does a photograph come to betaken? And takenby whom? I am perhaps in the process, with my words, of making oV with his photographs, of taking from him the photographs that he oncetook. Can one appropriate anothers mourning? And if a photograph istaken as one takes on mourning [ prend le deuil], that is, in separation,how would such a theft be possible? But then also, how could such atheft be avoided?


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only photograph it, as if one instantaneously had to take its image bysurprise at its birth: immobile, monumental, impassive, singular, ab-stract, in retreat from all treatment, unreachable in the end by any peri-phrasis, by any transfer, by rhetoric itself, by the eloquence of trans-position. Reticent like a word that knows how to keep silent in order tosay so much, a word frozen in its tracks [tombe en arrt], or pretend-ing, rather, to be freeze-framed [arrt sur image] before a video cam-era. An oracle of silence. It gives itself in refusing itself. One time forall times. As soon as ittakes [prend] in language (but who will trans-

late this prendre in the phrase ds quelle prend dans la langue), andonce it is taken by it, it resembles a photograph. The sentence takes inphotography, or takes a photograph of the language that photographs it(like the photographer who photographs himself when he takes a pho-tograph of himself in this book). They are taken, the one and the other,in the unique example of this apparition, this sentence here and notanother, in this irreplaceable language; it is thus, it was thus, it hap-

pened, it took place, this sentence here, one time for all times, as weowe ourselves to death.

Still VIII

Prendre une photographie, to take a photograph, prendre en photographie,to take a photograph but also to take in photography: is this translat-

able? At what moment does a photograph come to betaken? And takenby whom? I am perhaps in the process, with my words, of making oV with his photographs, of taking from him the photographs that he oncetook. Can one appropriate anothers mourning? And if a photograph istaken as one takes on mourning [ prend le deuil], that is, in separation,how would such a theft be possible? But then also, how could such atheft be avoided?


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Still IX

I was coming back that day with friends from Brauron to Athens. It wasaround noon, and we were on our way to go swimming, after havingpaid our respects to the young girls walking in a procession toward thealtar of Artemis. The day before I had already returned, yet again to Athens, but that time it was from the tip of Cape Sounion, where we also went swimming, and I had recalled at the time the other signature ofByron, the other petroglyph marking his passageat Lerici this time,near Porto Venere. And I recalled the time it took for Socrates to die af-ter the verdict condemning him (and the name Sounion, as we know, is

inseparable from this). This was my third stay in Greece. Barely stays,regrettably, more like visits, multiple, eeting, and all too late. Why solate? Why did I wait so long to go there, to give myself over to Greece?So late in life? But a delay, these days, is something I always love as what gives methe most to think, more than the present moment, more than the fu-ture and more than eternity, a delaybefore time itself. To think the at-

present of the now (present, past, or to come), to rethink instantaneityon the basis of the delay and not the other way around. But delay is notexactly the right word here, for a delay does not exist, strictly speaking.It is something that will never be, never a subject or an object. What I would rather cultivate would be a permanently delayed action[retarde-ment demeure], the chrono-dissymmetrical process of the morato-rium [moratoire], the delay that carves out its calculations in the incal-

culable.

Still X

I have always associated such delayed action [retardement] with the ex-perience of the photographer. Not with photography but with the pho-tographic experience of an image hunter. Before the snapshot or


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Still IX

I was coming back that day with friends from Brauron to Athens. It wasaround noon, and we were on our way to go swimming, after havingpaid our respects to the young girls walking in a procession toward thealtar of Artemis. The day before I had already returned, yet again to Athens, but that time it was from the tip of Cape Sounion, where we also went swimming, and I had recalled at the time the other signature ofByron, the other petroglyph marking his passageat Lerici this time,near Porto Venere. And I recalled the time it took for Socrates to die af-ter the verdict condemning him (and the name Sounion, as we know, is

inseparable from this). This was my third stay in Greece. Barely stays,regrettably, more like visits, multiple, eeting, and all too late. Why solate? Why did I wait so long to go there, to give myself over to Greece?So late in life? But a delay, these days, is something I always love as what gives methe most to think, more than the present moment, more than the fu-ture and more than eternity, a delaybefore time itself. To think the at-

present of the now (present, past, or to come), to rethink instantaneityon the basis of the delay and not the other way around. But delay is notexactly the right word here, for a delay does not exist, strictly speaking.It is something that will never be, never a subject or an object. What I would rather cultivate would be a permanently delayed action[retarde-ment demeure], the chrono-dissymmetrical process of the morato-rium [moratoire], the delay that carves out its calculations in the incal-

culable.

Still X

I have always associated such delayed action [retardement] with the ex-perience of the photographer. Not with photography but with the pho-tographic experience of an image hunter. Before the snapshot or


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instamatic [instantan ] that, from the lens or objective, freezes fornear eternity what is naively called an image, there would thus be thisdelayed action. And thoughtful meditation on this delayed action alwaysgets woven within me along the lines of two Athenian threads: photog-raphy (the writing of lightis there a word more Greek?) and the enig-matic thought of theaion (the interval full with duration [lintervalle plein dune dure], an incessant space of time, and this is sometimescalled eternity). The intriguingpossibility of a delayed action gets woven or plotted out in advance along the lines of these threads. Inces-

santly. Incessantly [incessamment], what a word. Whence my passion for delay, and for the delay within delay (a pe-riphrasis for the advance, since time is needed to make this move), andmy mad love for all the gures of this moratoriumen abyme that are or-ganized within photographic inventionand with almost the sole aimof illustrating or bringing such invention to lightby the technique

that goes by the name of the delay mechanism, the automatic timer, orthe automatic shutter release [dispositif-retard, dclenchement-retard,le retard automatique]. At once banal in its possibility and singular andunprecedented in its operational workings, it has given rise today tomechanisms that are so much more sophisticated than so many imag-inable sophistics. Everything is going to be in place in just a moment,at any moment now [incessamment], presently or at present, so that,

later, a few moments from now, sometimes a lot later or even a verylong time from now, another present to come will be taken by surpriseby the click and will be forever xed, reproducible, archivable, savedor lost for this present time. One does not yet know what the image willgive or show, but the interval must be objectivelycalculable, a certaintechnology is required, and this is perhaps the origin or the essence oftechnology.


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Still XI

Lets go back to the Photographer on the Acropolis, whom you can seemeditating or sleeping, his head slouched down, in the middle of thisbook. Has he not set up in front of him, in front of you, an archaic g-ure of this delay mechanism? Did he not decide, after some re ec-tion, to photograph photography and its photographer, in order to leteverything that has to do with photography be seen, in order to book-mark everything in this book? He would have set the animal-machineon a Delphic tripod. His eyes are closed, as you can see, and he protectsthem even further from the light with sunglasses; he even sought out

the shade of a parasolunless its a re ector. As in an antique store, make an inventory of everything you can countup around this Photographer on the Acropolis. Con gured on the scene orstage of a single image, accumulated in the studied disorder of a pre-arranged taxonomy, theres an example, a representative, a sample ofall visibleaspects, of all the species, idols, icons, or simulacra of possiblethings, of ideas, if you will, of all those shown in this book: within a

space where all timesintersect or cross paths (an archaeology of ruins,a cemetery of phantoms, authentic antiquities or the merchandise ofantique dealers, a conservatory of Athenians, both living and dead, amarket or resale store in a street of yesteryear, and so on), there is alsoa crossing of all the kingdoms of the world (crossing in the sense of ge-nealogy and genres, but also in the sense of fortuitous encounters, ofthis tukhe that gathers them all together along the way, there where they

just happen to be, as it just may happen in a photograph that perhapsfeigns improvisation), all thekingdoms whose sediments this book an-alyzes: (1) everywhere you look, the petroglyphs of amineral memory;(2) the vegetation, rare but visible, growing between the stones; (3) anarcheology xed in stone of the Atheniandivinities (the allusions ofthe book suggest Dionysus rather than Apollo); (4) the livinganimal ,


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the photozoography of a black pigeon on the left (are its feathers blackor are they just in the shadow of this skiagraphy?); (5) the livinghu-man, the photographer himself or his model, the oneas the other, theone producing or re-producing the other, the one as the generator orthe progenitor of the other; (6) technical objects, whether (a) everydayimplements (the bench, the bucket next to a fountain, if Im seeingit right) or (b) machine-instruments (two cameras, at least, from twogenerations, one large one small, one old one young, one more archaicthan the other, an archeology of photography; (7) and then so many

abyssal or re ecting screens (the cameras themselves, the sunglasses,the parasol-re ector); (8 + n) and, nally, the representations dis-played on the camera itself and under the parasol. These representa-tions, these photographs of photographs (these phantasmata , as Plato would have hastened to say, and that is why one can no longer counthere, no longer count on this process of re ection, for as soon as youcount on it you can no longer count, you lose your head or you lose the

logos), these copies of copies that you can see in two places, at oncein front of the photographer, on the body of the camera set on the tripod,and behind, behind the back of the photographer, under the parasolthese are perhaps some of the photographs of the book. The book an-nounces itself in this way.


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Still XII

When, exactly, does a shot [ prise de vue] take place? When, exactly, isit taken? And thus where? Given the workings of a delay mechanism,given the time lag or time diV erence, if I can put it this way, isthe photograph taken when the photographer takes the thing in viewand focuses on it, when he adjusts the diaphragm and sets the tim-ing mechanism, or else when the click signals the capture and the im-pression? Or later still, at the moment of development? And should we give in to the vertigo of this metonymy and this in nite mirroring when they draw us into the folds of an endless re exivity? Does not

one of the other photographs,The Parthenon (no. 11), exhibit, at least inpart, the same camera on a tripod, the same parasol or the same re ec-tor? Does not the same camera also display photographs on its side?Other photographs this time, it is true, the portrait of a man and, in ad-dition (a supplementary mise en abyme), reduced-size images of this very Parthenon, which forms the background for everything else? Myhypothesis is that this structure is generalized throughout the book.

It is its law, and it will even have engendered this so cleverly calcu-lated book, engendered it through a nonspontaneous generalization. Whence the putting to the test and the program that I would be able tosketch out later: incessantly to walk along this line of the abyss, to tryto look without trembling at this in nite mirroring that carries the re-

ection of all these photographs, to take up the list of the 8 +n cate-gories or genres of being and play at sorting each of these shots into

ontological boxes or squares, hopscotching, as it were, from one tothe next. Like cards on a map, a sort of Cartesian cartography. But Iknow in advance that metonymy will make this classi cation impos-sible and lacking in rigor. Exposed to repetition, each takeeach shot[clich ]will have more than one place in this classi catory schema.But it doesnt matter; I will try this another time, if only to do or toprove the impossible.


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Still XIII

Imagine him, yes him, through the images he has taken. Walkingalong the edge, as I said just a moment ago, of the abyss of his images,I am retracing the footsteps of the photographer. He bearsin advance the mourning for Athens, for a city owed to death, a city due for death,and two or three times rather than one, according to diV erent tempo-ralities: mourning for an ancient, archeological, or mythological Ath-ens, to be sure, mourning for an Athens that is gone and that shows thebody of its ruins; but also mourning for an Athens that he knows, ashe is photographing it, in the present of his snapshots, will be gone or

will disappear tomorrow, an Athens that is already condemned to passaway and whose witnesses ( Adrianou Street Market [no. 20], the NeonCaf on Omonia Square [no. 2], Street Organ [no. 4]) have, indeed, dis-appeared since the shot was taken; and nally, the third anticipatedmourning, he knows that other photographs have captured sights that,though still visible today, at the present time, at the time this book ap-pears ( AthinasMeat Market [no. 6] and Fish Market [no. 13]),will have

[devront] to be destroyed tomorrow. A question of debt or of neces-sity, a question of economy, of the market, all the sights along thesestreets, all these cafs, these markets, these musical instruments, willhave[devront] to die. That is the law. They are threatened with death orpromised to death. Three deaths, three instances, three temporalitiesof death in the eyes of photographyor if you prefer, since photographymakes appear in the light of the phainesthai, three presences of dis-

appearance, three phenomena of the being that has disappeared oris gone: the rstbefore the shot, the second since the shot was taken,and the last later still, for another day, though it is imminent,after theappearance of the print. But if the imminence of what is thus due fordeath suspends the coming due, as theepochof every photograph does,it signs at the same time the verdict. It con rms and seals its ineluc-table authority: this will have to die, themise en demeure is underway,


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noti cation has been given, the countdown has already started, thereis only a delay, the time to photograph, though when it comes to deathno one even dreams of escaping itor dreams that anything will bespared. I am thinking of the death of Socrates, of the Phaedoand theCrito. Of the incredible reprieve that delayed the date of execution forso many days after the judgment. They awaited the sails, their appear-ance oV in the distance, in the light, at a precise, unique, and inevitablemomentfatal like a click.

Still XIV

We know what Cape Sounion meant for the death of Socrates. It is fromthere, in short, that Athens saw it cominghis death, that is. By ship.From the temple of Poseidon, at the tip of the cape, during my rst visit(it was the day before the sentence we owe ourselves to death), I imag-ined a photograph, and I saw it before me. It eternalized, in a snapshot,

the time of this extraordinary moment: Socrates awaiting death. Thathe was told about the passing of the sails so close to Athens, just oV thecape, oV this very cape and not another, from the heights of this verypromontory where I found myself with friends before going swimmingdown below, at the foot of the temple, that this was the same cape, im-passive, immutable, silent like a photographthat is what will continueto amaze me to my dying day. All of this belongs to the luminous mem-

ory of Athens, to its phenomenal archive, and that is why I dare insistupon it here. I would thus have photographed Socrates awaiting death,Socrates knowingly awaiting a death that had been promised him: whileothers are on the lookout at Cape Sounion, he knowingly awaits duringthe entire time of this delay. But he decided not to escape; he knowsthat this will be but a temporary reprieve, this delay between the speak-ing of the verdict and the taste of the pharmakon in his own mouth. He


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noti cation has been given, the countdown has already started, thereis only a delay, the time to photograph, though when it comes to deathno one even dreams of escaping itor dreams that anything will bespared. I am thinking of the death of Socrates, of the Phaedo and theCrito. Of the incredible reprieve that delayed the date of execution forso many days after the judgment. They awaited the sails, their appear-ance oV in the distance, in the light, at a precise, unique, and inevitablemomentfatal like a click.

Still XIV

We know what Cape Sounion meant for the death of Socrates. It is fromthere, in short, that Athens saw it cominghis death, that is. By ship.From the temple of Poseidon, at the tip of the cape, during my rst visit(it was the day before the sentence we owe ourselves to death), I imag-ined a photograph, and I saw it before me. It eternalized, in a snapshot,

the time of this extraordinary moment: Socrates awaiting death. Thathe was told about the passing of the sails so close to Athens, just oV thecape, oV this very cape and not another, from the heights of this verypromontory where I found myself with friends before going swimmingdown below, at the foot of the temple, that this was the same cape, im-passive, immutable, silent like a photographthat is what will continueto amaze me to my dying day. All of this belongs to the luminous mem-

ory of Athens, to its phenomenal archive, and that is why I dare insistupon it here. I would thus have photographed Socrates awaiting death,Socrates knowingly awaiting a death that had been promised him: whileothers are on the lookout at Cape Sounion, he knowingly awaits duringthe entire time of this delay. But he decided not to escape; he knowsthat this will be but a temporary reprieve, this delay between the speak-ing of the verdict and the taste of the pharmakon in his own mouth. He


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prepares himself for it and yet he speaks to his friends about preparingfor death, about the exercise, care, or practice of death (epimeleia touthanatou ), a discourse that still watches over us, a discourse of mourn-ing and of the denial of mourning, all of philosophy. This discourse en-tertains irresistible analogies to, but has absolutely nothing to do with,I am certain, the verdict we owe ourselves to deatha sentence thatmight even say the contrary and will always remain, moreover, some-thing that belongs to the French idiom. Yes, we still share the same wonder (ethaumazomen ) expressed by Echecrates. He is the one who

asks Phaedo whathappened. What, exactly,took place? While the verdicthad been pronounced long before ( palai), the death had been put oV until much later ( polloi hysteron phainetai apothavon). To answer thequestion of what happened (Ti oun en touto, o Phaidon), Phaedo invokeschance, tukhe (it happened in this way because it just so happened that way); it was a matter of chance. It happened that the stern of theship which the Athenians send to Delos was crowned on the day before

the trial. What ship? The one, following an ancient Athenian tradition(we are still recounting the history of Athens), that once carried the seven boys and seven girls whom Theseus led to Crete and whom he thensaved in saving his own skin. It is, in short, this saving, and the pledgethat followed, that is responsible for granting Socrates a reprieve of afew days, a provisional salvation, in this case, the time for an unforget-table discourse on true salvation, salvation by philosophy. Because in

order to give thanks for the safe-conduct of the young boys and girlsled by Theseus, the Athenians had made a pledgea pledge to Apollo.They pledged to organize a yearly pilgrimage or procession (theoria)to Delos. The law (nomos) of Athens thus prescribes that during the en-tire time of the theoria the city must be pure and no one may be pub-licly executed until the ship has gone to Delos and back ( Phaedo 58b).This time is not calculable, and neither is the delay, therefore, because


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the voyage took a long time and the winds were sometimes, unforesee-ably, unfavorable. Such an uncontrollable delay mechanism (what iscalled physis), such incalculability, grants Socrates an indeterminablereprieve. One knows when thetheoria begins, but one does not see theend. One can determine the arkhe te s theorias, the moment when thepriest of Apollo crowns the stern of the ship, but one never knows whenthe theoria will end, and when a sail will announce the return from oV Cape Sounion. That is the interval that separates the verdict from thedeath; that is the delay that standsbetween these two moments. That is

why, Phaedo concludes, Socrates passed a long time [ polus khronos]in prison between his trial and his death [metaxu te s dike s te kai touthanatou ] ( Phaedo 58c). One never knows when thetheoria will end. And yeta story of the eyeSocrates claimed to know it; he claimed toknow when thetheoria would end thanks to a dream or, more precisely,by means of a knowledge [ savoir ] based on a seeing[voir], the seeing ofa vision (enupnion) come to visit him in the middle of the night in the

course of a dream. A dream in black and white that was awaiting us. It will await us even longer. It is right at this moment of presumption thatI dreamed of photographing him, photographing Socrates as he speaksand claims to have foreseen the instant of his death. When he claims, by a kind of knowledge, an unconscious knowledge, it is true, to see inadvance, to foresee and no longer let himself be taken by surprise bythe delay of death. My own dream telesympathized with his. It was in

accord with what he says about it.


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Still XV

Meeting with a Photographer on the Acropolis. He seems to be sleeping,dreaming perhaps, unless he has died, struck down right there by asun stroke, his head slouched down on his chest. He is perhaps the au-thor of this book. He would have photographed himself, in full sun-light. Here, then, is the heliograph: he wears a hat on his head, but heis still too exposed because the parasol or the re ector behind him isno longer over his head, protecting, it would seem, only other photo-graphic images, already a few reproductions, no doubt. You can makeout another camera, much smaller, behind him. And in front of him,

on a Delphic tripod, a camera from another age is looking at him, un-less it is looking elsewhere, perhaps equipped with a delay mecha-nism. The autophotographer has laid out around him, as if he had savedthem on his ark, an example or copy of every species of thing, not eachof the genres of being distinguished in Platos Sophist(being, move-ment and rest, the same and the other), not each of the ontological re-gions of transcendental phenomenology, not the categories orexis-

tentials of Being and Time (Dasein, Vorhandensein, Zuhandensein), but8 +n other things. He thought he had thus divided up physisor thekosmos, the world and then the world of culture within it, if you wantto hold onto these later categories, the world or its photographic ar-chive: in 8 +n kinds of things. He dreamed that all these photographs would take these things by surprise, in order or out of order, at random,there where theyhappened to be found. He inspected and inventoried

them. 1. Themineral and earthen thing, materiality without life, whetherruins or not, whether with or without inscription:all these photos be-long in some way to this rst class. 2. Thevegetal, growing thing: almost all the photos (the only ex-ceptions to this form of physis, to this more or less natural form ofgrowth, are a few images of the market or the caf, a few fragments


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of frescoes, Zeus seated in the frieze from the Theater of Dionysus, adetail of a funeral stele, the throne of the priest of Dionysus, and thebouzouki player: everywhere else, something is growing ). 3. Thedivinething (nearly all the statues and the steles, all the tem-ples, a good half the images). 4. Theanimal thing. But here things get a bit too complicated, forthere is the subclass ofliving beings (the pigeonoutside, near the pho-tographer, for example, and the doginside, just as black, near thesculpture in the Stoa of Attalos [no. 29]) and then the subclass of the

dead (of those put to death in truth, killeden masse, but less natural,already merchandise or commodities in the meat or sh market,in the hands of merchants); and then there are the living beings roam-ing freely (whether natural, the pigeon, or domesticated, the dog)and living beingsin captivity (this other kind of merchandise in theform of baby chicks in cages in the Athinas Market [no. 8]). The dreamruns out of steam, but the dreamer goes on. As does his taxonomy. We

are only about halfway there. One is reminded of all the classi cationsof the Sophist(one would be tempted to try them all out, but this hasto be given up), all those we encounter even before getting to the mi-metic arts, notably, the photographer as sherman or angler, an im-age hunter whose art is unclassi able because it partakes simultane-ously, being neither a mimetics nor a sophistics, of all the categoriesset in opposition to one another by the Stranger: poetic or produc-

tive arts as opposed to acquisitive arts, acquisition through exchangeas opposed to by coercion, coercion by ghting as opposed to hunting,hunting inanimate things as opposed to living things, living things oranimals that walk on land as opposed to those that swim, animals thatswim through the air as opposed to those that swim in water (219c220b). The image hunter has all of this in his book, but who would beable to decide whether his is an art of production or reproduction? Just


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times, someone thus went out of his way to recall the emblem of suchruins in these images of a ea market, whose studied order exposes somany technical or cultural objects that have in common their be-ing defunct (defunctus), that is, without function, obsolete, out of com-mission, dysfunctional, fallen into disuse [dsaffect ]. The tool and themachine are stripped down to being mere things. But the thing isalso a fetish, adisused object,divestedof use but thenreinvested with thesurplus value of a fetish, a fetish to keep an eye on, to keep, to sell, tosee being sold. An original aV ect, an aV ect without pathos, surrounds

the aura of these photographs: the sense of obsolescence [laffect de ladsaffection], precisely, the aV ect of the one aV ected by this disuse orobsolescence of technical objects, defunct signs of culture. Is not thisaV ection of the photographer for these implements or signs fallen intodisuse also an aV ect of the delay, of the delay without return? With-out return, and that is why I hesitate to use the Greek word that youno doubt have on the tip of your tongue, the Greek word that speaks of

the longing for return, of homesicknessnostalgia. If there is nostal-gia in these photographs, nothing makes it obvious. But that is not all. Among these fetishes (and it will be incumbent upon us later to re-call that the photograph of a fetish fetishizes in its turn its own abyss,for every photograph is a fetish), history, history as the historicity oftechnology, is seen to be discreetly but surely exposed, recounted, ana-lyzed, objecti ed by the objective or the lensprecisely as the history

of ruin or disuse, the history of obsolescence. Two or three examples:besides the measuring instruments (scales and weights), besides therecording or transmitting devices (radios, typewriters, tape record-ers), besides the instruments of art and technology (music, painting,and photography), you will be able to con rm that, whether in use orout of use, the cameras belong to several diV erent technological gen-erations. Is this just a coincidence? It is at the very least the sign of a


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history of photographic technologyand, as always, of its ruin and itsmourning, its archive and its fetishization. Then there are the musi-cal instruments: they are not alone in recalling a history of sonogra-phy, just as the tape recorder recalls a history of phonography. Here isa telephonography (and Socrates daimon enters momentarily into thedream of the photographer) that announces to you its program: thereare at leasttwo old telephones for sale (one has to wonder what was thelast message to be interrupted at the moment of disconnecting theseconveyers of voices), and the two telephones are both to be found in

the upper left, in the displays of two diV

erent merchants, one at the Mo-nastiraki Market (no. 19) and the other at the Adrianou Street Market(no. 20). Neither of them is working, true, but one looks like the ances-tor of the other. (It is, moreover, right next to a photographed ances-tor, a prominent Athenian, I imagine, with a full mustache in an ovalframe, an eY gy that the heirs wanted to get rid of for a little money, yet another way of mourning.) The ancestral telephone has a dial, the

younger one is a touchtone. Black and white tooen abyme: the old tele-phone is black with a white spot in the middle; the younger one is light, with a dark spot on its tummy. Each telephone is placed on top of anold radio. Its as if we were being reminded, in the middle of all thesemusical instruments, that these photographs bear the mourning ofsounds and voices. Negatives of sonograms or of phonograms, multi-media in mourning, compact disks (cd s, video cassettes, orcd rom s )

all of a sudden voicelessallowing us to hear all that much better thespectral echo of what they silence. The echo becomes in us the origi-nal. These photograms would resonate like echographic whispers; they would immediately emanate from out of memory. That is the photog-raphers touch, in the service of his gaze, of his re ection, of the lighthe projects or re ects. And sometimes it is anarti cial light. 7. Under the heading ofre ection, precisely, there would be even


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more to say: everything is re ected and re ected upon, of course, byboth the photographer and the photographic process. But in addition,the technological art and arti ce of re ection, such as those foundin arti cial lighting, turn out to berepresented at every moment. Count,for example: (1) the numerouslight bulbs above the displays of the meatmarket or the sh market (nos. 6 and 13), and then those in the NeonCaf (no. 2), which hang down from the ceiling on a long wire (givenall the discarded appliances or instruments exhibited hereradio, taperecorder, fanthis book xes or focuses on a certain epoch of electric

culture in modern domesticity, a short history of Athenian electric-ity, and everything seems to be calculated on the basis of this electrol-ogy, right up to that calculating thing that goes by the name of an elec-tric meter, just to the left of the two brothers in the Athinas Market[no. 22]); (2) parasol-re ectors; (3) themirrors in the Neon Caf and be-hind the two brothers in the Athinas Market. 8. Re ections on re ection and the in nite mirroring of themise

en abyme (in the large sense of the term: the metonymic represen-tation of a representation), re ections on the phantasms of simula-cra or the simulacra of phantasms (to cite or to sidetrack Plato)theinnumerable, playful ways in which photography, or else painting, isphotographed. Here again, between painting and photography there isa pseudo-diV erence of generations, as the art of one generation repre-sents in its own fashion the art of an earlier generation. Just look at the

easel on which there is a painting of ruins in perspective ( Near the Towerof the Winds, no. 25): the painter is gone, the photographer remainsinvisible, and the woman spectator, seen from behind, seems at onceto look on without understanding and to let herself be taken in by thespectacle. Even though, in a certain sense, everything is representa-tion in what is photographed in this way, one can count the represen-tations of representations, for example, certain photographs or paint-


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ings that themselves become elements within the overall picture, suchas those we have already mentioned, the portrait in the oval frame orthe painting of ruins, the images in newspapers and magazines againstthe backdrop of a wall covered in graY ti in the Adrianou Street Mar-ket (no. 21), or else, in a narrower sense of the term, representationsof representations en abyme (The ParthenonPhotography in Waiting ,no. 11), where the Parthenon itself becomes the object of a photo-graph and where three or four copies of this photograph (more or lessidentical shots, it seems) are framed near a portrait and displayed on a

camera, which is itself photographed with the Parthenon in the back-ground. One can even make out, it seems, small human gures, cus-tomers probably, tourists in black and white, in the two generationsof representations. Their respective places have changeda sign of thepassing of time. Like the painter earlier, the photographer is invisi-ble, but he is nonetheless there, not far from the camera on the tripod,another camera this time, it too draped in black and white. In the very

diversity of their structure (simulacra, phantasms, representations ofrepresentations, photos of photos, photos of painting or of images ingeneral, in nite mirroring), these re ective processes hollow out, atonce deepen and drain, the aV ect or sense of obsolescence we discussedearlier. They demonstrate an aV ection for what has fallen into disuse,a mourning that keeps within itself what it loses in the keeping. An ac-knowledgement of a debt or anio u with regard to death is signed by ev-

erything that re ects in the photographicact as well as in the structureof the photogram. And this is the case no matter what is represented,no matter the theme, content, or object of the image, even when deathis not shown therein, not even indirectly recalled or gured. The debtdoes not wait for the funeral stele or the inscription on a sepulture. Themost living thing can let the debt beheard, as soon as it is taken in pho-tography, the baby chick in its cage or the bouzouki player. And even if


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all these musical instruments, radios, telephones, and tape recordersdid not recall it, the phonogram of this music of death would resonatehere in black and white, from one photo to the next. Like a silent song.Like a dirge of mourning that recalls, for example, Demeter weepingfor Persephone, who had been abducted by Hades and whom Theseus, yes, him again, tried to carry away by descending into the underworld. At the center of one of the photographs, a spectacular street sign, theonly one, commemorates Kore, the young girl: , justabove its transliteration, persefonis (no. 24). Does not Persephone

reign over this entire book, Persephone, wife of Hades, the goddessof death and of phantoms, of souls wandering in search of their mem-ory? But also (and this is another world of signi cations with whichthe gure of Persephone is associated) a goddess of the image, of wa-ter and of tears, at once transparent and re ecting, mirror and pupil?Kore, Persephones other name, means both young girl and the pupilof the eye, what is called the pupil [koren kaloumen), and in which, as

Platos Alcibiades I reminds us, our face is re ected, in its image, in itsidol, when it looks at itself in the eyes of another. One must thus lookat this divinity, the best mirror of human things (133c). And all that would be due to death, along with the specters, and the photographicpupil, and the symphony of all these musical instruments.


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Still XVI

To photograph Socrates as a musical instrument. And musical instru-ments as so many Socrateses. For what does Socrates do? He waits, but without waiting; he awaits death and dreams of annulling its delay bycomposing a sacri cial hymn. Death is indeed slow in coming, but heknows, he believes he knows, how to calculate the arrival of the day ofreckoning. Not that he sees it coming , sees death coming, from CapeSounion, no, he lets it come, hehears it coming, you will recall, and thistoo is a kind of music. He dreams, he dreams a lot, Socrates does, andhe interprets his dreams. He describes them and wants to comply with

what they prescribe. He wants to do what he has to and he knows whathe has to do, what he owes. One of these dreams announces death tohim; it tells him when death will come, when the delay will end, along with its imminence. The other enjoins him to pay a debt by composingmusic to oV er to the god whose votive festival was responsible for de-ferring his death. In the Crito, as we know, Socrates owes to a dream thepower to calculate the moment of his death. The dream of a night allows

him to see and to hear. Apparition and appellation: tall and beautiful,clothed in white, a woman calls him by name in order to give him thisrendez-vous, the moment of death, thus annulling in advance both thedelay and the contretemps. (Is this not the very desire of philosophy,the destruction of the delay, as will soon be con rmed?) She comes tohim, this woman does, as beautiful, perhaps, as the name of Socrates;he thought he saw her coming, thus seeing the death that would not

be long in coming. One has the feeling that his own name has all of asudden become inseparable from the beauty of this woman. Neitherthis beauty nor his name, as a result, can be separated from the news ofhis death: news announcing to him not that he will die, but rather thathe will die at a particular moment and not another. The woman pre-dicts for him not a departure but an arrival. More precisely, she ori-ents the departurefor it is indeed necessary to depart and part ways,


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to leave and take ones leavefrom the voyages point ofarrival by cit-ing the Iliad. But Crito persists in deeming this dream to be extrava-gant, strange, or mad (atopon to enupnion), and he continues to dreamof Socrates salvation.

s o c r a t e s : What is this news? Has the ship come from Delos, at the ar-rival of which I am to die?

c r i t o : It has not exactly come, but I think it will come today from thereports of some men who have come from Sounion and left it there. Now

it is clear from what they say that it will come today, and so tomorrow,Socrates, your life must end.

s o c r a t e s : Well, Crito, good luck be with us! If this is the will of thegods, so be it. However, I do not think it will come today.

c r i t o : What is your reason for not thinking so?

s o c r a t e s : I will tell you. I must die on the day after the ship comes in,must I not?

c r i t o : So those say who have charge of these matters.

s o c r a t e s : Well, I think it will not come in today, but tomorrow. Andmy reason for this is a dream which I had a little while ago in the courseof this night. And perhaps you let me sleep just at the right time.

c r i t o : What was the dream?s o c r a t e s : I thought I saw a beautiful, fair woman, clothed in white rai-ment, who came to me and called me and said, Socrates, on the thirdday thou wouldst come to fertile Phthia.

A little later, so to speak, on the next day (this is in the Phaedo, theday before, when we left the prison in the evening we heard that the


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ship had arrived from Delos), a dream again dictates the law. Un-like the other dream, this one does not give Socrates anything to seeor to hear; it gives an order, it prescribes or orders him to composeand devote a hymn to the god who, while giving him death, therebygrants him the time of death, the delay or the reprieve as well as that which puts an end to the reprieve, the delay that does away with it-self. Socrates owes him this temporary stay of execution, and he is be-holden to this stay. And this music, the greatest music, is philoso-phy. Socrates must thus transform himself into a musical instrument

in the service of this philosophical music. He has just recalled that thesame dream (to auto enupnion) has visited him regularly throughoutthe course of his life. The vision was not always the same, neither theimage nor the phenomenon of what appears to the eyesthe pho-tograph, if you willbut the words always said the same thing (ta autade legon): Socrates, it said, make music and work at it. Socrates iscertain that thats what he has always done:

Because philosophy was the greatest kind of music and I was workingat that. But now, after the trial and while the festival of the god delayedmy execution, I thought, in case the repeated dream really meant to tellme to make this which is ordinarily called music, I ought to do so andnot to disobey. . . . So rst I composed a hymn to the god whose festival it was.


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we were laughing about it. My friends know that if I love delayed action[le retardement], the least delay kills me, especially when I am about toleave for the train station or the airport, that is, at the moment of arriv-ing at the point of departure. I began to explain all these reasons why,for me, nous nous devons la mort would remain forever untranslated,spelled out, photorthographed in an album of the French language. First, it did not necessarily have to be understood in the sense of thegreat post-Socratic and sacri cial tradition of being-for-death, thisethics of dedication or devotion that immediately comes to take this

sentence into its purview in order to say, for example: we must devoteourselves to death, we have duties with regard to death, we must dedi-cate our meditations to it, our care, our concern, our exercises and ourpractice (epimeleia tou thanatou, melete thanatou , as it is said at Phaedo 81a), we must devote ourselves to the death to which we are destined,and so on. In addition, one must respect the dead (so as, the implica-tion would be, to keep death at a respectful distance, out of a respect for

life). It is the death of Socrates, in short, that never stops watching overus, the culture of death or the cult of mourning, the way in which thispoor Socrates, between the verdict and the passing of the sails oV CapeSounion, believed that by not eeing or saving his skin he was savinghimself and saving within him, at the same moment, philosophy, allthat music that is philosophy, the greatest kind of music. But as forme, I persist in believing that philosophy might have another chance.

This ethico-Socratic virtue of we owe ourselves to death can easilybe translated into every language and no doubt every world view. Butthat is not the only meaning that is held in reserve in my sentence, andI protested silently against it. As for the redoubling of thenous in nous nous devons, it is no doubtdiY cult, if not impossible (I mean according to the economy of a word-for-word translation), to retain in another language its relation to the


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by surprise in the sun, would forever leave suspended, better than anyother sentence, more economically than any other, is the pragmaticmodality of its event. For it came alone, this sentence did, as decon-textualized as a photograph. It was thus impossible to decide, with-out any other context, as if its inscription were being read on a pieceof funerary stone or on its photograph, whether it was a matter of anethico-philosophical exhortation, with the performative potentialitythat comes along with it, or a constative description, or even an indig-nant protestation that would raise the curtain on centuries of decep-

tion and obstinacy: So (you say that, it is believed that, they claim that)we owe ourselves to death!--well, no, we refuse this debt; not only do we not recognize it, but we refuse the authority of this anteriority, thisa priori or this supposed originarity of obligation, of Schuldigsein, thisreligion of mourning, this culture of loss and of lack, and so on. (Theand so on is essential here, for it signs the suspension, signs the pho-tographic structure, the decontextualized aphorism of this sentence

that assailed me on that day, around noon, in full sunlight, in the do-mesticity of my old love aV air with this stranger whom I call my Frenchlanguage.) Against this debt, this obligation, this culpability, and thisfear of the dead, a we might, perhaps, protest (and this would notnecessarily be me, me or some otherme); we might be able to protestinnocently our innocence, one we protesting against the other. Nousnous devons la mort, we owe ourselves to death, there is indeed anous,

the second one, who owes itself in this way, but we, in the rst place,no, the rst we who looks, observes, and photographs the other, and who speaks here, is an innocent living being who forever knows noth-ing of death: in thiswe we are in nitethat is what I might have wantedto say to my friends. We are in nite, and so lets be in nite, eternally.It is, in any case, from this thought, beneath the sun, at the momentof returning to Athens, that we could at least dream of pronouncing,


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and summoning to appear, but in the mode of a denunciation, the lit-tle sentence we owe ourselves to death. The sun itself is nite, as weknow, and its light might one day come to an end, but us? Lets leave

nitude to the sun and return in another way to Athens. Which wouldmean: there is mourning and there is deathnotice I am not sayingmemory, innocent memoryonly for what regards the sun. Every pho-tograph is of the sun.

Still XVIII

Is not this impassioned denunciation the last sign of mourning, thesunniest of all steles, the weightiest denial, the honor of life in its wounded photograph?

Still XIX

So many hypotheses! What could have been going through the head ofthis photographer on the Acropolis? Was he sleeping? Dreaming? Washe simply pretending, feigning the whole thing? Was he playing dead?Or playing a living being who knows he has to die? Was he thinking ofeveryday Athens, of the Athens of today, or of the Athens of always,aei? Was he already haunted by the strati ed ruin of all the Athenianmemories he would have wanted to take in view, to shoot, this day, to-

day, under this sun, but for every day and forever? Or was he hauntedby what took place, one ne day, between photographic technologyand the light of day? Or else by what took place, one day, between pho-tography, the day or night of the unconscious, archaeology, and psy-choanalysis? Would he recall, for example, a certain disturbance ofmemory on the Acropolis? (Eine Erinnerungsstrung auf der Ak-ropolis, 1936), which I have never stopped thinking about, especially


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Still XVIII


Still XIX

So many hypotheses! What could have been going through the head ofthis photographer on the Acropolis? Was he sleeping? Dreaming? Washe simply pretending, feigning the whole thing? Was he playing dead?Or playing a living being who knows he has to die? Was he thinking ofeveryday Athens, of the Athens of today, or of the Athens of always,aei ? Was he already haunted by the strati ed ruin of all the Athenianmemories he would have wanted to take in view, to shoot, this day, to-



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Still XVIII


Still XIX

So many hypotheses! What could have been going through the head ofthis photographer on the Acropolis? Was he sleeping? Dreaming? Washe simply pretending, feigning the whole thing? Was he playing dead?Or playing a living being who knows he has to die? Was he thinking ofeveryday Athens, of the Athens of today, or of the Athens of always,aei ? Was he already haunted by the strati ed ruin of all the Athenianmemories he would have wanted to take in view, to shoot, this day, to-



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at the point where Freud meditates upon what he calls in French thenon arriv ? One might as well ask what takes place when, photographed in theprocess of photographing (himself), photographed photographing,active and passive at the same time, in the same time, that is, duringtime itselfwhich will always have been this auto-aV ective experienceof passactivitya photographer takes a shot of himself. One might as well ask what happens to him, and to us, when his action thus takes uptaking itself by surprise, but without ceasing to await this surprise. He

awaits (himself), thisbonhomme

does, this good fellow photographer.Right there in the theater of Dionysus, he reckons with the incalcula-ble. I then dream his vision, the re of a declaration of love, a ash inbroad daylight, and one would say to the other: It takes me by surpriseto be waiting for you today, my love, as always. Dionysianism, philos-ophy, photography. It remains to be knownwhat is (ti esti ) the essenceof the photographic form from the point of view of a delay that gets car-

ried away with overtaking time. A silent avowal, perhaps, and reticentas well, because it knows how to keep silent, an in nitely elliptical dis-course, mad with a single desire: to impress time with all times, at alltimes, and then furtively, in the night, like a thief of re, archive at thespeed of light the speed of light.


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Documents

Athens, Still Remains